After the show at The Bottom Line, NYC, April 5, 1981 L-R Jimmy Wimpfheimer, Doug James, Al Copley, Ronnie Earl, Danny Motta, John Rossi,...

The first volume of ‘The Island Book of Records - 1959-1968’ filled 390 pages and covered the first ten years of Island Records. Volume 2...

I find it hard to believe that it was 50 years ago that John Broven, the indefatigable English blues scholar, first published his...

The Salesman's Friend ... Here is an odd item - the Picturephone, the film projecting record playing way of selling! Reading the sheet of...

The Postman'sTale It’s funny how some events stick in our memory and others disappear into the fog of the past. Certain occasions in life...

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM American Rhythm & Blues In England 1962 – 1966 The Unseen Photographs of Brian Smith ISBN: 978-0-9561439-4-5 . Arts,...

The Plowman's Tale Higher Court Farm was a 500-acre hill farm nuzzled up against the Brendon Hills, and in the early 70s home to over a...

My friend Tom and I returned to Winchester in 1963 with a taste for cider, an appreciation of pubs and a hankering to visit more. Due to...

I’ve spent a lot of time in bars and pubs. Growing up in the UK and reaching the age of 18, and legally able to drink alcohol, was a rite...

Ron Levy at the window - Porky in the passenger seat. Roomful had owned an interesting assortment of vehicles before I met them,...

For many years Roomful of Blues traveled the country in a converted bookmobile, made by Gerstenslager of Worcester, Ohio. The vehicle...

Wes Dover - Thee Reggaeologist My wife Britt spent the weekend cleaning out the desk in her office. The last year of her working life was...

Chris Blackwell started Island Records in Jamaica in 1959, recording local talent. His first three releases all made the Jamaican charts....

So Richard is gone. Although his breakthrough hits were in 1955 in the USA, strangely his record label Specialty didn’t have a UK outlet...

Guy with Mott the Hoople Guy Stevens. I have so many memories of Guy. As a musically aware teenager in the UK as the first Rock ’n Roll...

The site used to be a drive-in movie theater, and spreads over many acres, now covered in tarmac. It takes its name from the Oakland...

My dad was a clockmaker, and the motto that was always engraved on the faces of his clocks was the latin phrase ‘Tempus fugit'.  Time...

The streets are deserted, save for the occasional walker or runner. They pass and wave, and we wave back, uttering some plague referenced...

I wrote a few disparate things during the Covid pandemic, all of 'em sheltering under the 'Lockdown' umbrella. Here is the first, and for...

My musical awakenings in the UK were rather varied. Like many who spent much of their later life in the blues field,...